The Pulse
Hims & Hers beat on revenue and swung to an $86M loss.
The August 10 print showed revenue of roughly $753M, up 38% year over year and about 9% ahead of estimates, with subscribers reaching nearly 2.9 million.
Gross margin fell to 64% from 76% a year ago, the fourth consecutive quarterly decline, driven by mix shift into lower-margin branded GLP-1s. A $42.5M net profit a year ago became an $86.3M net loss.
Management raised full-year revenue guidance to $3.1B to $3.3B and told analysts to expect margins to stay below historical averages as the mix keeps evolving.
That is the whole category's next two years in one quarter, and it is a lifecycle problem before it is a finance problem.
U.S. News published its first GLP-1 telehealth platform ratings.
On August 12, U.S. News & World Report rated 20 platforms prescribing branded GLP-1s, with 11 earning top marks.
Read the criteria, because they are not acquisition criteria. Clinical support, long-term follow-up, health screening, transparent pricing, and patient feedback.
Every one of those is something your lifecycle program either demonstrates or fails to. The category just got a public scorecard that grades retention behaviour, and it will end up in the comparison articles your patients read before they pick.
The exit path is now almost entirely acquisition.
Across 2025 and the first half of 2026, 268 of 282 digital health exits were acquisitions rather than IPOs, per Galen Growth. Q2 2026 alone saw 71, the busiest M&A quarter since late 2021.
Median time from founding to exit has stretched to about 9.5 years, up from roughly seven in 2022.
Longer holds and strategic buyers change what gets diligenced. Nobody acquiring a telehealth brand in 2027 is paying for subscriber count without looking at what each of those subscribers actually contributes.
The Deep Dive
Hims just published the cleanest public example of a lifecycle metric going up while the business underneath it got worse.
Revenue grew 38%. Subscribers grew 19%. On any lifecycle dashboard built the way most of them are built, that quarter reads as a win.
The company lost $86.3 million.
1. The number that moved is not the number that matters.
Run the back of the envelope on the reported aggregates.
Revenue of $753M against 2.9 million subscribers is about $260 per subscriber. A year earlier, $546M against 2.44 million was about $224. Revenue per subscriber up 16%.
Now apply the margin. At 64%, gross profit per subscriber is about $166. At last year's 76%, it was about $170.
Revenue per patient up 16%. Gross profit per patient down 2%.
Those are derived numbers, not reported ones, so treat them as directional. But the direction is the point: the metric most lifecycle teams report to their founder moved decisively in the wrong direction while looking great.
2. Mix shift is a lifecycle decision, not just a supply decision.
The easy read is that this happened to Hims. Branded GLP-1s carry worse margin, the mix moved, the margin followed.
But mix is not weather. Mix is the sum of which treatment your flows push, which cross-sell you built, which plan your cancellation save offers, and which category your welcome series sends people toward.
Every one of those is a lifecycle choice, and most of them were made when the margin profile was different.
If your abandonment flow drives to your highest-revenue treatment because that is what optimises the dashboard, you are actively steering the mix toward the thing that is quietly costing you contribution.
3. The fix is a column, not a strategy.
This does not need a replatform or a new framework. It needs one more field.
Add cost of goods per treatment to your lifecycle reporting, so every revenue number has a gross profit number beside it.
Re-rank your treatments by gross profit per patient per month rather than by price.
Point your highest-leverage flows (abandonment, cross-sell, cancellation save) at the top of that new ranking instead of the old one.
The uncomfortable part is that this often reverses your priorities. The treatment your team is proudest of converting is sometimes the one contributing least per patient.
Takeaway: stop reporting lifecycle revenue without a margin column next to it. In a category where the manufacturers now set your input costs, revenue per patient is a vanity metric with a dashboard tile, and gross profit per patient is the only version of that number that tells you whether the flow you just shipped made you money.
Quick Takes
The refill window is a retention mechanic you did not design.
LillyDirect holds Zepbound self-pay pricing at $299, $399 and $449 only when the patient refills within 45 days of their last delivery. Miss the window and maintenance doses revert to somewhere between $499 and $699.
That means a lapsed reminder is no longer a nudge. It is a price increase the patient absorbs and eventually blames someone for.
Pull your refill reminder timing. If the first one fires at day 40 or later, you are cutting it close on a window you do not control, and the recovery conversation after a patient gets repriced is far more expensive than the reminder would have been at day 33.
Margin compression quietly repriced your discount.
A 20% retention discount at a 76% gross margin gives up about a quarter of your contribution on that order. The same 20% at 64% gives up closer to a third.
Nothing about the offer changed. The damage did.
If your save offers and win-back discounts were sized when the category ran at branded-adjacent margins, they are now more expensive than the churn they prevent on your thinnest treatments. Re-run the arithmetic per treatment before the next promotional calendar, not after.
One Thing to Try
Pull the last 90 days of revenue broken out by treatment.
Get the cost of goods for each one from finance, apply it, and divide by the number of active patients on that treatment. You now have gross profit per patient per month, by treatment.
Sort that list. Then open your abandonment flow, your cross-sell, and your cancellation save, and check which treatment each one actually pushes.
If your highest-volume flow points at anything other than the top two rows of that sorted list, you found this quarter's most expensive misalignment.
Takes about an hour, and most of that is waiting on finance.
If retention is your biggest revenue leak, that’s what we fix. growthtrigger.xyz
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